Profile Information

Virat Kohli is an Indian international cricketer. He is a right-handed batsman and occasional right-arm medium pace bowler. He is the current captain of the Indian team in Test cricket and vice-captain in limited overs formats. In the Indian Premier League (IPL), he captains the Royal Challengers Bangalore.

After representing Delhi at various age-group levels and domestic cricket, Kohli captained India to victory at the 2008 Under-19 World Cup in Malaysia. A few months later, he made his ODI debut for India against Sri Lanka. Initially having played as a reserve batsman in the Indian team, he soon established himself as a regular in the middle-order in ODIs. He was part of the Indian squad that won the 2011 World Cup. Kohli then played his first Test in 2011 against the West Indies at Kingston. By 2013, he shrugged off the tag of "ODI specialist" with Test hundreds in Australia and South Africa.The same year, he also reached the number one spot in the ICC rankings for ODI batsmen for the first time.

Kohli was appointed the vice-captain of the ODI team in 2012 and has since also captained the team on several occasions in the absence of regular skipper Mahendra Singh Dhoni. After Dhoni's Test retirement in 2014, Kohli was handed over the Test captaincy. Kohli holds numerous batting records including the fastest century by an Indian batsman, the fastest batsman in the world to 6,000 ODI runs and the fastest to 17 hundreds in the history of ODI cricket. He is only the second batsman to have scored 1,000 or more ODI runs in a calendar year for four consecutive years. He has also found success in the Twenty20 format, winning the Man of the Tournament at the 2014 ICC World Twenty20 in Bangladesh. Later that year, he became the top-ranked T20I batsman in the ICC rankings.

Kohli has been the recipient of many awards such as the ICC ODI Player of the Year in 2012 and the BCCI's international cricketer of the year for the 2011–12 season. In 2013, he was given the Arjuna Award in recognition of his achievements in international cricket. SportsPro, a UK magazine, rated Kohli as the second most marketable athlete in the world in 2014. He became a co-owner of the Indian Super League team FC Goa in 2014.